Nine Lives (SPOILERS)
Cert: PG / 87 mins / Dir. Barry Sonnenfield / Trailer
Despite being a great devotee of all things cinematic, I don't really keep up with the 'showbiz news' side of the media. Tales of woe come and go, and unless they make it onto the 'actual' news or are scandalous enough to turn up in my Twitter feed, I don't really hear of them. As a result, I cannot imagine what financial apocalypse has occurred around the Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey that he'd sign up for this. Christoper Walken and Jennifer Garner's names on the cast list surprise me not one jot (they'd go to the opening of a fridge), but Spacey? That poor, poor man.
And so, the aforementioned trio autopilot their way through a Frankenstein body-swap morality tale, assembled from the disembodied tropes of every other one before it. Kevin Spacey is a slightly mean businessman (not like Ebeneezer Scrooge mean, just a bit grumpy like most middle-aged men tend to be) who is zapped into the body of a cat during a lightning storm after his daughter's wished for a cat, to teach him the error of his ways! And to get him to bring dead mice and birds in from the garden for his family more often. Or something. Naturally, hilarity ensues because cats are inherently comical creatures. Garner plays his unlikely borderline-trophy wife, Walken plays the wise old man in the pet shop (not at all like the old man off of Gremlins), and Malina Weissman plays his daughter: the kid-character in a kids' film who is largely ignored by the screenplay.
The film actually begins passably enough, Spacey playing his role with some amount of pantomime gusto, at least. But once he inhabits the cat's body (the point of the film, remember), the whole thing seems to grind to an embarrassing crawl. Without the facial reactions or physical acting to back it up, Spacey's laconic inner monologue comes off as abject boredom, as even the central premise of man-in-cat isn't mined for any sense of uniqueness or novelty.
One can only assume that the budget for this movie went on the cast and the (relatively well-rendered) CGI cat, because the rest of the film looks like a cheap TV-movie. Which is fine if it happens to be on your TV and you haven't actively paid to watch it. Because that's really all it's good for. Although even kids*1 are more discerning than this.
The most insulting aspect of the whole film is how unconvincing the 'be a better person' schtick is handled. It's not like there isn't a new interpretation of A Christmas Carol every other year; there are plenty of examples out there. If you need (or indeed, get) any kind of guidance from Nine Lives, you're already in a position where no film can save you.
…and the cat dies in the end.
They try and act like it doesn't, but we all know it does.
13 Going On 30 and YouTube cat-videos.
No.
No.
No.
…no.
No.
Level 2: This film stars Kevin Spacey, who also appeared in 1988's Working Girl alongside Harrison 'Solo' Ford.
All roads lead to Han, today.
*1 And even as I type that I know I mean "especially kids". You might not like much of what they enjoy, but they're far more choosy consumers of entertainment than adults.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
You've seen this before. The title may not be familiar to you, and the same could go for the cast, but you've seen this before. A comedy-romance tale of teenage love, trust, friendship, bitching, underdogs and self-discovery, The Duff is never outright unlikeable, but is lazy to the point of being a Greatest Hits / cover-version of all high-school comedies, ever. Only with extra hashtags. That's what the kids like, apparently.
You really get the feeling that the movie has been written by a middle-aged man (and it was) who has a teenage daughter and mistakenly believes he understands them as a result. There's a Batman reference in there, but it's not Affleck. Not even Bale. It's a nod to the 1989 Keaton flick. The film also features a faux-awkward Spinal Tap reference. I was actually starting to think that as a 40-something geek, maybe I was the target demographic after all. Usually I'd say 'we were all there once', but I'm not sure that screenwriter Josh Cagan has ever actually been a teenager. (Note to Mr. Cagan: You don't get unfriend-notifications on Facebook. Please use Facebook before writing about Facebook*1. Thanks.)
Leading the pack of stereotypes is Mae Whitman, who has already (more than) earned her comedy stripes, and is so much better than this film that I suspect she may have taken the role to prove the point to her agent. And although he's likeable enough as a supporting player, Robbie Amell does seem to have 'young Tom Cruise' as his practiced, default expression. What kind of aspiration is that for the next generation of actors?
The film uses a few on-screen graphic displays which it fails to maintain as an ongoing meme (perhaps thankfully), and also has some fantasy/daydream sequences and an inner-monologue in the same sporadic manner. Almost as if they've been tacked on as an afterthought in post-production but weren't able to be expanded out as a feature. Luckily when it *does* work (which is more often than I'm making it sound, to be fair), The Duff coasts on charm rather than merit, although that by no means papers over the cracks. The film is typified by that moment where a character switches off a bedside lamp, and the technician who's been tasked with turning on the blue lighting state that passes for night-time in movies, does so a fraction of a second too late. And that's the take which makes the final cut. It's lazy, cliched and as transparently false as the stuck-up characters it claims to be preaching against.
The Duff will be fine for audiences young enough to be tasting the formula for the first time, but it'll seem a little stale to everyone else.
If the final twenty minutes of the film were any more patronising, director Ari Sandel would need to man the door as the credits rolled so that he could pat every audience member on the head as they left.
*1 Fair play, the film-makers have somehow got both Apple and Google to sign off on using their branding (a feat which a significant number of films either can't or won't do). We also get an ad-shot from Urban Dictionary, although I suspect that license probably came out of the petty cash ;)
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
